


Tefilah

by ama



Series: In Ruth's Footsteps [1]
Category: Justified
Genre: Friendship, Gay Male Character, Gen, Jewish Character, Jewish Themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-13
Updated: 2016-06-13
Packaged: 2018-07-14 18:13:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7184810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ama/pseuds/ama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tim Gutterson is a man of surprises.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tefilah

**Author's Note:**

> This is part of a series of multifandom oneshots featuring various characters converting to Judaism, in honor of the Jewish holiday of Shavuot. Tim was requested by candiansuperhero on tumblr. (Warnings for brief mentions of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.)
> 
> Tefilah: Prayer

Tim walked into the break room at lunchtime and instinctively knew that he should turn around. He didn’t know why, but he could see the signs--Rachel’s lips were pressed in a grimace as she studiously pretended to read a magazine, ignoring the other people in the room, while Raylan sat at another table and looked at Whitman, one of the newer marshals, with a look of vague disgust on his face. This could only mean disaster.

“Sure, I’m sure there are  _ some _ good Muslims out there--”

Tim turned on his heel.

“But I’m just saying, you can’t trust--hey, Gutterson, how’s it going?”

“My day’s been sunshine and roses,” Tim said as he turned back around, looking at the other man cautiously. “What’s up?”

“You know what, I’m glad you showed up--Givens and I were just talking and I want to hear your opinion. See, he thinks that saying Muslims can’t be trusted is like saying all Christians are bigots, but I don’t think it’s the same thing. I mean, just look at their countries, they’re all fucked up and killing _each_ _other_ , so how good can they be for the rest of us, you know?” Tim happened to look at Rachel; he saw her close her eyes and by the way her lips twitched he guessed that she was counting down from ten. At one she committed homicide. “And hey, I figured you of all people would have to agree with me. _You_ know what Arabs are like.”

Tim folded his arms and leaned against the counter. Whitman was looking at him with a smug and expectant expression; Tim  _ would _ have felt guilty about what he was about to say, because they had had prisoner transport together Whitman’s first week and Whitman had insisted on paying for breakfast, which was nice of him, but that irritating-as-shit expression blew all his guilt clean away.

“Arabs or Muslims?” he asked. Laying down the groundwork.

“What’s the difference?”

Tim rolled his eyes.

“Never mind. Listen, are you expecting me to agree with you because I served in Iraq and Afghanistan, or because I’m Jewish? Because either way, shut the fuck up.”

Raylan snorted, Rachel pursed her lips in a forgone attempt to hide her smile, and Whitman looked affronted.

“I just meant--with what you’ve seen--”

“I  _ know _ what you meant. But the thing civilians never seem to fucking understand is that even if we came back and agreed with every single action the Army takes--and that’s an  _ if _ if ever you’ve heard one--a unit still lives or dies on the back of its local interpreters. I knew five of them when I was over there. Good guys, all Muslim, all putting their lives on the line so I could do my job, and you know what, three of them are dead because of Taliban and al-Qaeda retaliation. So if you want to be an asshole, go ahead, but at least have the goddamn moral fiber to own it, and not use me and mine as an excuse.”

Whitman turned red. Tim smiled at him--that sort of wolfish grin that could have been genuine or could have been dangerous, but either way was kind of creepy. Whitman tried to bluff through it, mumbled for a bit, and then tried to stroll out casually as if he didn’t have his tail tucked between his legs.

Tim walked over to the table, and Raylan kicked a chair leg in a polite attempt to make space. Tim accepted with an elaborate bow and began to take out his lunch.

“So. You’re Jewish?”

“Yep.”

“I did not know that.”

Tim raised an eyebrow. He held up his index finger, closed his eyes, and muttered a quick blessing over his sandwich, more obviously than he usually did.

“You sound surprised,” he said with a shrug.

“A bit. No offense, you just didn’t strike me as a religious kinda guy. Is this like a ‘mom’s Jewish, got a bar mitzvah, haven’t been to temple since’ thing?”

“Ooh, someone met a Jew or two in Miami,” Tim drawled. He bit into a carrot with a dramatic snap and grinned. “Talking the lingo and everything.”

“You know me, cultural ambassador of the office.”

“But wrong on every count. Mom’s not Jewish, Dad’s not Jewish, never had a bar mitzvah, I’m Modern Orthodox so I don’t call it a temple, and I’m there pretty much every day. Good try, though.”

“You converted or something?”

“I told you we had a smart one on our hands,” Rachel said. She was flipping through her magazine, with genuine interest this time. “Remember, Tim? That very first day, he walked in and I turned to you and said ‘nobody wearing a hat that big can be as stupid as he looks.’”

Tim winked at her and Raylan rolled his eyes.

“Okay, okay. You know how much I love your little pick on Raylan parties, but I’m just trying to make polite conversation. My personal life seems to be the favored topic around this office and it seems like it would be fun to share the spotlight. Speaking of hats, where’s yours?”

He gestured vaguely at the crown of his head.

“Oh, I leave that at home,” Tim said in an airy voice. “Figured I’ve given Boyd Crowder enough reasons to want to shoot me.”

“Don’t worry, you’re not that high on his list. I handcuffed him to a tree last week, remember?”

“That’s right. And I would be his first ever Jewish acquaintance, right, so I don’t think I need to worry about being spotted otherwise. That doesn’t mean  _ you’re _ off the hook, though--did you never notice I’m the only marshal in the office who’s almost never on call on Saturdays?”

“I thought you were blackmailing Art somehow. I was going to see if I could get in on it.”

“Nope. Religious accommodation. Shomer fucking Shabbos.” He paused. Crickets. “Big Lebowski? Anybody?”

“I got it,” Rachel said without looking up.

“Yeah, but you didn’t laugh.”

“I think that counted as a reference, not a joke.”

“You’re cold, Brooks.”

“So how does that actually work?” Raylan asked, poking at his yogurt. “’Cause in Harlan, we had people--” He lifted his hands in the air like a preacher. “--‘come to God’ every other week and it was basically just some shouting in church and then a quickie baptism. And there’s only the one church, of course, so I don’t know how much of a conversion it is.”

“Well, there is a baptism, sort of,” Tim said. “’Cept we call it something else, and also we had it first. They also had to do something below the belt that I won’t talk about with a lady present.”

“Thank you for sparing my delicate ears,” Rachel said.

“And I had to get three rabbis quiz me on Judaism and my life goals and agree that I passed. That was fucking scary, let me tell you--two of them did not appreciate my personal brand of wit. It took my rabbi a bit of arguing to bring them around.”

“You had to take a  _ test _ ?”

“Yeah, it’s a lot more than just ‘hey I don’t believe in Jesus.’ My whole conversion took… two years? No, technically three years. I actually just spent the first year trying to find a rabbi who would agree to sponsor a gay guy for conversion without me promising to marry a woman.”

“And you found one? In Kentucky?” Raylan asked dubiously. “Also damn, Gutterson, we are breaking down all kinds of barriers today, huh?”

“Yeah, gimme five minutes and I’ll start telling you all about my relationship with my father. Get to the good stuff. And no, actually I was living in Chicago then. I got transferred to Kentucky about nine or ten months before you got here, and I kind of haven't gotten around to telling my current rabbi yet. It would be a pain in the ass if I wanted to get married some day, but luckily Rachel and I have sworn off men.”

He raised his soda in a toast in her direction.

“Amen,” Rachel said absently.

“How do you already know all this?” Raylan demanded of her. Rachel set the magazine aside and folded her hands with a sweet schoolgirl’s smile.

“Because, Raylan,” she said in a Tennessee simper. “Tim and I, we’re bffs. We have biweekly sleepovers where we get together, tell each other  _ all _ our secrets, braid each other’s hair, gossip about you, and eat kosher marshmallows.”

“You’re not Jewish, too, are you?” Raylan asked as Tim snickered inelegantly and started to choke on his sandwich.

“Yes. I am. I wear this cross for fun.”

She gestured at her necklace and then stood so she could walk over and give Tim a few good thumps on the back. (“He would have been fine,” Raylan said, waving her away. Tim coughed twice, flipped him off, and drained the rest of his soda.)

“ _ Anyway _ . It was basically two years of reading and learning Hebrew and trying to live like a Jew. There’s a lot involved, I won’t go into it all. Basically I started when I left the Rangers. My spotter for most of my Afghan tour was Jewish, and I used to like the routine of the prayers, you know?”

“Yes, I can see how, being in the Army, you were so devoid of routine.”

“Fuck off. Listen, when you spend four days on a mountain with one other guy staring at somebody for hours on end, time starts to lose all fucking meaning. But time is kind of a big deal in Judaism. You mark when the sun comes up, when it’s going down, when it sets. Every week the Sabbath is like a holiday, and on every holiday you thank God for letting you get there. When you get shitty Army rations you say a blessing, when you see something beautiful or terrible or weird you say a blessing, when you take a shit and everything works right you say a blessing.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. When I was getting tired of everything, I liked that. And I didn’t know what to do with myself when I got out, so it gave me something to do.”

Someone to _be_. Tim remembered the first time he had arrived at shul early and been counted as part of the prayer quorum; the first time he had answered to Daniel ben Avraham. It was as good as being wrestled into the tattooist’s chair by his Ranger buddies, better than being called Sergeant Gutterson for the first time because he had no qualms about how he had earned the name.

The truth was that he felt the most himself when he was praying–the steadiest, the kindest and the boldest. He wrapped tefillin with the precision of taking a rifle shot, wrestled with points of Talmud as much as he did his cases, sank into psalms like they were the greatest novels ever written. Tim was not a fanciful guy, but he knew when HaShem was calling him.

Not that he was going to admit that in the frigging break room.

“Besides,” he said as he munched on a chocolate chip cookie. “Purim kicks Christmas’s ass.”


End file.
